Spoilers for our possibly totally wrong ideas about character gender in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Butch:

I got nothing. You say something clever.

Feminina:

Well, I didn't play either, but I had a thought that it's interesting that we've barely had a hint of the 'real world' so far. We're in the Animus, yes, we've been reminded of that, but they're not making us get out of it and pretend we care about what's happening out there.

So far. 

Also, are you getting the sense that 'let the Animus choose' your gender just means it picks one for you and that's it? Because I still haven't been anything but a woman, and now I'm wondering "was my impression that it was going to switch back and forth completely weird and unfounded?" 

Did you have that impression too, or am I making it up that it implied that? Mr. O' says he read it as "the Animus will just pick for you," but I somehow got the idea that it was going to show different memories from different perspectives, sometimes with a male Eivor and sometimes female. But I might be completely imagining that.

Butch:

Maybe we'll be women the whole time, but I kinda doubt it.  I read it like you did, that we'll get the perspective from whoever's signal is "stronger" at the time or whatever.  We still haven't learned WHY there are overlapping signals (and, given AC's rather spotty history of explaining itself, we may never), but I'm anticipating a switch. 

Mr. O didn't pick "Let the animus pick" and got a man, did he? 

Feminina:

No, he picked a man. Because yeah, that would be an interesting data point if he let it pick and it randomly assigned him male. Hm. But that did not happen.

All right, well, at least I wasn't completely imagining things (or if I was, I have company!--though given that we're exactly the same person in games, I suppose it's not surprising that we might have jointly misunderstood).

But we'll wait and see, then. It IS, after all, going to be a very big game, so I suppose we can't really make sweeping generalizations about what's going to happen based on, what, the 5 hours I've played so far.

Butch:

Yeah, never make any real judgments before you can kill the giant elk. 

WEIRD T SHIRT!!!!!

But I think we're right.  After all, "Let the animus pick" was the default.  "Flip a coin and that's what you get the whole game" would be an odd default. 

Feminina:

Unless it was an attempt to make sure roughly equal numbers of people who didn't care one way or the other played both genders? Like, "we're so committed to not having one or the other be the default, that we'll randomly choose one!"

Honestly, though, that's a weird thing to bother to program. You could just make people choose, as many games do. Unless...their load screen does talk about how the game was created by a team of many different faith traditions and beliefs and gender identities, or something. Maybe this is their way of nodding to the people who don't want to be forced to choose one side of the gender binary. "You don't have to pick one, we'll do it for you!"

Though in that case our original interpretation, that it's going to switch back and forth, would be an even more effective nod. "We'll pick for you and you can be both! And thus, in a way, neither!"

I don't know, man. We'll have to see how things develop.

I mean, we could obviously also look it up, the internet undoubtedly knows, but I like to see how it turns out without spoilers.

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